Monthly Archives: August, 2012

I hope the radio programs I’ve recently appeared on aren’t as unpopular or unknown as this blog appears to be, or I am truly spinning my wheels. On Aug. 5 I was on the Firebase Network Veterans Hour on the Stardust Radio Network with host Rick Townsend, and Deanna Spignola invited me on to talk to her for two hours Aug. 20 on her daily program, “Spignola Speaks,” on the Republic Broadcasting Network.

Both went as well as could be expected, having last done radio in the mid-1980s. It was good practice for my Sept. 4 date with Phil Williams of Knoxville’s WOKI 98.7 FM, likely the top afternoon-drive show here, and a real opportunity for a breakthrough. I never thought he would actually schedule me, but I finally got the official invite on Friday. Will be on Firebase again tomorrow night for an hour.

Joel Freedman is doing great work on behalf of Truth at Last. He placed a letter to the editor of The Banner Independent, of Booneville, Mississippi, in the same Prentiss County neighborhood as smaller Baldwyn, where Earskin Nabers lived most of his life, and where he died in 2006 at 82. Freedman’s letter ran at the top of the Opinion section on August 16.

After stating his belief that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan “were captured and tortured by the Japanese” and died on Saipan, Freedman wrote that he was “impressed by Campbell’s account of the importance of World War II Marine Corps veteran Erskine Nabers in finding the truth about Earhart. … “Campbell describes Nabers as ‘a soft-spoken, low-key individual, content in his quiet life of work and devotion to family in the obscurity of small-town Mississippi.’

“Campbell explains, ‘As a radio message code clerk in the communications center of the 8th Marine Regiment on Saipan in July 1944, Nabers decoded the top-secret message announcing the discovery of Amelia Earhart’s Electra in a hangar at Aslito Field. … “After his death,” Freedman continued, “I can almost imagine Nabers’ spirit was greeted by the spirits of Earhart and Noonan, who thanked him for his courage and honesty, on their behalf. When I read a good book, I often learn about people I wish I had met during their lifetime. Earskin Nabers is one of these people.”

Just when it seemed things couldn’t get worse for Truth at Last — poor sales, no media reviews, no interest, no visitors to the site or blog — on Aug. 8, Dave Martin (www.dcdave.com) put up a 4,000-word review of the book on his site. Titled “Hillary Clinton and the Amelia Earhart Cover-up,” it’s an excellent overview of the book, and includes a reference to the odious Hillary’s connection to the ongoing government lies and propaganda, and quotes longtime New York TimesWashington correspondent Turner Catledge, who wrote that President Franklin D. Roosevelt “was a consummate manipulator, a man who misled, deceived, lied outright when it was necessary to gain his ends.”

We still can’t be certain that FDR sent Amelia on a mission to “get lost” in the Marshall Islands, and thus knew the Japanese had her in 1937, or whether he didn’t know until much later, possibly as late as June 1944, when the Earhart plane was discovered on Saipan by U.S. military forces. A researcher told me that at the National Archives in College Park, Md., he found large gaps in the records of U.S. radio listening stations that were active in the Pacific area in 1937, stations that would have intercepted and later decoded Japanese transmissions that might have indicated their capture of Earhart and Fred Noonan.

Several years ago Robert Stinnett, author of Day of Deciet: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor(2001), told me in an email that “the Earhart story of 1937 involving naval intercepts would be in the[communications intelligence radio] Station H [Heeia,Oahu, Hawaii] Monthly Reports for July 1937, et al, possibly also in Station Baker, Guam and Station Victor, American Samoa.” Stinett said he saw nothing about Earhart in any of the previously classified World War II material he claimed he forced NARA into releasing to the public through three Freedom of Information Act requests.

Dave Martin is an erudite, veteran news analyst, writer and pundit, and his efforts in dislodging the 1949 Wilcutts Report on the investigation into the alleged suicide of former Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal, after his fatal fall from the 16th story of the Bethesda (Md.) Naval Hospital have all but proven that Forrestal was murdered. I contacted him in 2008 to tell him about Forrestal’s alleged involvement in the Earhart matter per Thomas E. Devine’s claims, and kept in touch. I was extremely gratified when Martin copied me on an email to an associate and recommended Truth at Last, which he called a “great book.” High praise indeed. Recently he thanked me for prodding him to do “this important work,” ie., writing a fine review of Truth at Last.

“Don’t expect any of our mainstream press to be directing you to Campbell’s book, though,” Martin writes in concluding his review. “If he is to be ignored, it will not be because the case he makes for the capture of Earhart and Noonan by the Japanese is too weak. It will be because it is too strong.”

My sincere thanks go out to Dave Martin, a member in good standing of a small group of enlightened persons who ascribe to a set of beliefs my friend Frank Benjamin, a Maryland college teacher, calls “MISH,” for Marshall Islands-Saipan Hypothesis. MISH is a cute acronym, but Frank is incorrect about one detail — Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan’s landing in the Marshalls and deaths on Saipan are not a “hypothesis,” but are empirical facts that scream to be acknowledged by our government, still in thrall to the corrupt FDR and his phony legacy.

Just ask the good people of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, who issued a set of four postage stamps in 1987 that depicted various aspects of the ill-fated fliers’ final flight, including the crash of the Electra at Mili Atoll and its recovery by the Japanese survey ship Koshu, events that are common knowledge in that less-sophisticated area of the world.

Posts navigation

The Second Edition of “Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last,” is a large 7″ by 10″ paperback offering 370 pages at the same low retail price of $19.95, and significantly less at Amazon.com. The book adds two chapters, a new foreword, several new subsections, the most recent discoveries, rare photos and a near-total rewrite to the mountain of overwhelming witness testimony and documentation presented in the first edition of “Truth at Last. ”

Even as a child, Amelia had the look of someone destined for greatness. In this photo, she seems to be gazing at events far away in time and space. Who can fathom it?

This is a priceless portrait of our heroine at the tender age of 7. She seems to be peering into timelessness, as if she can actually see the amazing adventures that are in store for her — and us. Who can fathom it?

Follow "Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last" via email.

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Search

Amelia at Spadina Military Hospital, Toronto, Canada, circa 1917-’18

While visiting Muriel at St. Margaret’s College in Toronto in 1917, Amelia encountered three Canadian soldiers who had lost a leg, and decided, on the spot, to join the war effort. She enrolled in the Voluntary Aid Detachment and was assigned to the Spadina Military Hospital. “Sister Amelia soon became a favorite among the wounded and discouraged men,” Muriel wrote.

Arrival at Londonderry, Ireland, May 21, 1932

Earhart had spent the last 15 hours tossed by dangerous storms over the North Atlantic, contending with failing machinery and sipping a can of tomato juice to calm her queasy stomach. That day—May 21, 1932—she planned to end her journey at Paris’ Le Bourget airfield, where exactly five years earlier Charles Lindbergh had completed the first solo transatlantic flight. When her Vega’s reserve fuel tank sprang a leak and flames began engulfing the exhaust manifold, however, Earhart wound up navigating to a Northern Ireland pasture. From that moment , Amelia Earhart’s star shined brightest, and her like has never been seen since.

Acclaim at Londonderry

Another great photo of Amelia, as she prepares to take off from Derry, Northren Ireland, and fly on to London, where worldwide fame awaited. After a flight lasting 14 hours, 56 minutes during which she contended with strong northerly winds, icy conditions and mechanical problems, Earhart landed in a pasture at Culmore, north of Derry, Northern Ireland. The landing was witnessed by Cecil King and T. Sawyer. When a farm hand asked, “Have you flown far?” Earhart replied, “From America.” The site now is the home of a small museum, the Amelia Earhart Centre.

Summer 1960: The Saipan Truth comes out

The headline story of the May 27, 1960 edition of the San Mateo Times was the first of several stories written by ace reporter Linwood Day that set the stage for Fred Goerner’s first visit to Saipan in mid-June 1960 and led Goerner’s 1966 bestseller, “The Search for Amelia Earhart.” Day worked closely by phone with Goerner, and on July 1, 1960, the Earhart frenzy reached its peak, with the Times announcing “Amelia Earhart Mystery Is Solved” in a 100-point banner headline accross its front page.

This story appeared in the San Mateo Times “Family Weekly” news magazine on July 3, 1960. The sensational account revealed details of her life as an 11-year-old on 1937 Saipan, but the true picture of what she actually saw that day remains in question. Was it a seaplane or a landplane in trouble that landed at Tanapag Harbor?

Fred Goerner with witness Manual Aldan, Saipan, 1960

Fred Goerner with witness Manuel Aldan on Saipan, June 1960. Aldan was a dentist whose practice was restricted to Japanese officers in 1937, and though he didn’t see the American fliers, he heard much about them from his patients. Aldan told Goerner that one officer identified the white woman as “Earharto!” (Courtesy San Francisco Library Special Collections.)

The only bestseller ever penned on the Earhart disappearance, “Search” sold over 400,000 copies and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for six months. In September 1966, Time magazine’s scathing review, titled “Sinister Conspiracy,” set the original tone for what has become several generations of media aversion to the truth about Amelia’s death on Saipan.

This story, which announced Thomas E. Devine’s Saipan gravesite claim, appeared in the San Mateo Times on July 16, 1960. Devine returned to Saipan in 1963 and located the gravesite shown to him by the Okinawan woman in August 1945, but did not share his find with Fred Goerner. Instead Devine planned to return to Saipan by himself, but he never again got the opportunity.

Thomas E. Devine, whose involvement with events surrounding the discovery and destruction of Amelia Earhart’s Electra 10E as a 28-year-old Army postal sergeant on Saipan in July 1944 shaped the rest of his life. Devine’s 1987 classic, “Eyewitness: The Amelia Earhart Incident,” is among the most important books about the Earhart disappearance ever penned.

Thomas E. Devine’s “Eyewitness: The Amelia Earhart Incident” (1987) is Devine’s first-person account of his eyewitness experiences on Saipan, where he saw Amelia Earhart’s Electra 10, NR 16020 on three occasions, the final time the plane was in flames. Devine’s book is among the most important ever penned in revealing the truth about the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

On November 13, 1970, the Japan Times reported, for the first time, the shocking claims of Mrs. Michiko Sugita, who was told of Amelia Earhart’s execution on Saipan in 1937. Sugita, the eleven-year-old daughter of the civilian chief of police on Saipan in 1937, told the Japan Times in 1970 that Japanese military police shot Amelia Earhart as a spy there. Sugita, the first Japanese national to report Earhart’s presence on Saipan, corresponded for a time with Thomas E. Devine, but later went missing and his letters were returned, marked, “No such person, unknown.”

Mrs. Michiko Sugita, Japanese national, Earhart witness

Mrs. Michiko Sugita, whose account as told to the Japan Times in 1970 remains the only testimony from a Japanese national that attests to Amelia Earhart’s presence and death on Saipan following her July 2, 1937 disappearance. Sugitia corresponded with Thomas E. Devine for a few years in the mid-1970s before Devine’s letters were returned with the notation, “No such person. Return to sender.”

This story appeared at the top of page 1 in the July 13, 1937 edition of the Bethlehem (Pennsylvania)-Globe Times. “Vague and unconfirmed rumors that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan have been rescued by a Japanese fishing boat without a radio,” the report began, “and therefore unable to make any report, found no verification here today, but plunged Tokio [sic] into a fever of excitement.” The story was quickly squelched in Japan, and no follow-up was done. (Courtesy Woody Peard.)

Adm. Chester W. Nimitz: Fred Goerner’s most respected informant

Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, circa 1942, the last of the Navy’s 5-star admirals. In late March 1965, a week before his meeting with General Wallace M. Greene Jr. at Marine Corps Headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, Nimitz called Goerner in San Francisco. “Now that you’re going to Washington, Fred, I want to tell you Earhart and her navigator did go down in the Marshalls and were picked up by the Japanese,” Goerner claimed Nimitz told him. The admiral’s revelation appeared to be a monumental breakthrough for the determined newsman, and is known even to many casual observers of the Earhart matter. “After five years of effort, the former commander of U.S. Naval Forces in the Pacific was telling me it had not been wasted,” Goerner wrote.

Marshall Islands 50th Anniversary Commemorative Stamps, 1987

The independent Republic of the Marshalls Islands issued these four postage stamps to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Amelia Earhart’s landing at Mili Atoll and pickup by the Japanese survey ship Koshu in July 1937. To the Marshallese people, the Earhart disappearance is no mystery or rumor, but a stone cold fact.